The Big Time

by Fritz Leiber

  CHAPTER 14

  Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

  --Webster

  "NOW WILL YOU TALK?"

  Cretans have eyes under their back hair, or let's face it, Entertainersaren't Soldiers. Kaby weaved to one side and flicked a helpful hand andpoor old Maud went where she'd been going to send Kaby. It sickened meto see the gravity take hold and yank her down.

  I could have jumped up and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I'm not abit brave when things like my life are at stake.

  Lili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushedher down again and quietly said, "Where is it?" and then hauled off andslapped her across the face. What got me was the matter-of-fact way Kabydid it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, oreven deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do somethingnasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach.

  Lili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but shedidn't look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili's pearlnecklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls wentbouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down Lili's graysilk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lilistarted to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illyhad come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with thejob Kaby was doing.

  "Listen, slut," she said, "we have no time. You have a healing room inthis place. I can work the things."

  "Here it comes," I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything,on top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personallystylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn't going to beallowed to blow up peacefully. They weren't satisfied with an A-bomb.They had to write my private hell into the script.

  "There is a thing called an Invertor," Kaby said exactly as I'd knownshe would, but as I didn't really hear it just then--a mental split I'llexplain in a moment. "It opens you up so they can cure your insideswithout cutting your skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the bigparts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin--youreyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it--becoming the lining of a little holethat's half-filled with your hair.

  "Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to doto them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First thehealer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in aboutfifty heartbeats. We'll see what ten heartbeats do to you without thesleepy air. Now will you talk?"

  * * * * *

  I hadn't been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I'd havegone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liveris more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, becausealthough you live with your liver all your life, you never see it orlearn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messingaround with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful.

  I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint ofIntroversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that histentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had lookedat him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself tome by squeaking, "Don't mind me, I'm just sensitive. Get on with thegirl. Make her tell."

  Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meantthinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwballsculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw afaint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out andtouched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powdered glass. I tippedup the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn't marred atall, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright asever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds inthe floor by something even harder.

  That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had areal idea in his pickled brain when he'd been pushing the thing at allof us and trying to tell us something. He hadn't managed to say anythingthen, but he had earlier when he'd been going to tell us what to doabout the bomb, and maybe there was a connection.

  I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got "Inversh ...bosh ..." Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki orotherwise.

  So I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got "glovsh" andthen I grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched thepieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel.

  It all hung on that black right-hand hussar's glove Lili had producedfor Bruce. Only she couldn't have found it in Stores, because we'dsearched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn't been anygloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been. Also,Bruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had beenthrough the whole Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been onlythe two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off thebar--those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he'd brought fromoutside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him.

  * * * * *

  So a left-hand glove had disappeared--the last I'd seen of it, Lili hadbeen putting it on her tray--and a right-hand glove had appeared. Whichcould only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove intoan identical right. She couldn't have done it by turning it inside outthe ordinary way, because the lining was different.

  But as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary wayto turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had toput them on the Invertor in Surgery and flick the switch for fullInversion.

  Or you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into aperfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a right-handglove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the scienceboys call it; I've heard of it being used in surgery on the highlyasymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right handto a man who'd lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into anamputated left.

  Ordinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and youwouldn't think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Placewhere the Doc's a drunk and the Surgery hasn't been used for hundreds ofsleeps.

  But when you've just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy thingsto do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce's extraleft-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got aright-hand glove to give him.

  What Doc had been trying to say with his "Inversh ... bosh ..." was"Invert the box," meaning we should put the bronze chest through fullInversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got theidea from Lili's trick with the glove. What an inside-out tacticalatomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did notparticularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized.

  But the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lilihad decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his pleafor mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience--andmaybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce'schicks and ... all those other things we'd believed in for a while. Soshe'd taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not manyseconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an objectthat no one would think of questioning--except someone who knew theGallery by heart.

  * * * * *

  I looked at the abstract sculpture a foot from my nose, at the clusteredgray spheres the size of golf balls. I had known that the inside of theMaintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, butI hadn't realized they were quite _that_ big.

  I said to myself, "Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis,but you're the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listento your deductions when they're all practically living on negative timealready."

  I got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn't havebeen in--there are some things Ente
rtainers are good at--and Kaby wasjust saying "you go mad in about fifty heartbeats." Everybody on theirfeet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no timefor him except to hope he hadn't done anything that might attractattention to me.

  I stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery--there's onegood thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn't creak. I walkedthrough the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorlesscigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse'straining, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positionedon the gleaming table of the Invertor.

  I froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinkingof the other time and trying to remember what it had been that botheredme so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes,but then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanitygood-by, I don't know which, and twisted the switch all the way over,and there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times asecond as nice as you could want it.

  It must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time itwas Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused thedirection finders.